Hi and welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Hannah and today I'm here with Adrian Mayer, historian of

science and author of the just released book Gods and Robots, Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of

Technology. Mayor is the 2018-2019 Brugroon Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral

Sciences at Stanford, and her previous work has been on the

science buried in ancient legends, Native American legends about dinosaur fossils, legends about ancient

Amazonian women warriors, to King Mithridates, the Poison King, for which she was a National

Book Award finalist. In this latest book, Mayer shows us the earliest myths around ideas of

technology and even artificial life, from the first imagined robot to walk the earth, to actual

historical technological wonders of the ancient world, such as mechanical flying doves and giant

parades of self-moving automaton. So, Adrienne, let me just start with, what first

turned your interest towards these ancient ideas around technology and artificial life?

Well, as a folklorist and a historian of ancient science, what I'm interested in are the very

first inklings of the scientific impulse in pre-scientific cultures, especially antiquity, especially ancient

Greece and Rome, and associated ancient cultures. So I moved to Silicon Valley in 2006, where

there's just so much advanced innovations in automaton's and AI and trying to extend the lifespan and surpassing nature,

that I just started wondering, how deep are those roots?

And when did those desires and actual endeavors begin?

There's a lot of natural knowledge and even scientific folk knowledge, if you will,

embedded in mythology.

And all of my projects have been investigations into finding what's real in myths and legends and antiquity.

It's kind of like an archaeology of knowledge.

Absolutely. Sometimes I call myself a historian of human curiosity. That's wonderful. What a great job. So what do you actually mean by technology? What do you actually mean by ancient ideas about

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